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Isn't there an API for this thing? Having to configure text files each time I want to change just doesn't cut it, IMO. This is stuff that should be configurable at runtime. Things like that is what make me believe that ALSA should be called LSA instead.

IIRC the last page I linked to is also the libasound API docs. There would be a decent GUI for configuring ALSA, if people hadn't decided to ignore ALSA's entire infrastructure and build sound servers instead. I almost wrote one for a car PC I was building, but the car it was going into was totaled (and there were some issues with ALSA's LADSPA plugin support adding unpredictable latency) so it never happened.

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Different people have different needs. Onboard sound cards and my discrete sound card support 192 kHz. That $235 sound card has some crappy parts if it supports only 96 kHz.
HW mixing can be advantage in some cases, but it isn't option in many cases. If I would have to buy new sound card tomorrow I would still buy sound card without HW mixing because there is no reasonable priced card with HW mixing
which provides high quality sound to my headphones, which is most important to me. Using two sound cards is unacceptable because it isn't possible to connect one headphones to two sound cards at same time.

Your onboard sound card's "192kHz" probably rolls off significantly above 20-30kHz, with a much higher noise floor. Pay no attention to the sample rate. Unless you are working with ultrasound, the most important factors are measured frequency response, noise floor, jitter, and distortion. For final playback, 44.1k should be enough according to http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html.

You can use two sound cards at the same time by passing the line output of one to the line input of the other, then your headphones into the headphone output of the second. Finally, unmute the Line In on your second sound card's mixer.

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No, they cannot. You're confusing the dmix device with the hardware device.

uhm, dmix is part of ALSA. So yes, it (ALSA) can do software mixing. Also dmix is (usually) enabled by default (unless the sound card is able to do hardware mixing or you are using a very weird system with very strange options on the compiler side. I've never seen a linux system with ALSA that was not able to softwaremix without a soundserver. And I've seen quite some systems).

Comment

uhm, dmix is part of ALSA. So yes, it (ALSA) can do software mixing. Also dmix is (usually) enabled by default (unless the sound card is able to do hardware mixing or you are using a very weird system with very strange options on the compiler side. I've never seen a linux system with ALSA that was not able to softwaremix without a soundserver. And I've seen quite some systems).